It’s good to see folks in the search community challenging some assumptions behind PageRank, while introducing a new flavor of PageRank which replaces those assumptions with user data.

A patent application from Yahoo, published last week, takes aim at Random Surfers, Unguided Teleportation, Block Level Approaches, and the Equality of Links, from people who know PageRank very well.6 Comments

Well that is assuming that Google arent doing something similar.I am not sure which is the best approach, for Google to allow webmasters to influence which pages are considered important by internal link structure and encouraging people to link to "permalinks" or the Yahoo approach which is trying to determine that for them, based on user data.But this doesnt really change how you should construct a site, even if 70% of search was from Yahoo not Google.

This is of fundamental importance I believe. I don’t think any method that doesn’t include user actions will correctly separate the ‘ham’ from the spam. I’m sure Google must be doing some of this as well, even if it keeps PageRank out there for market branding reasons.

Good one, Matt - Yahoo Shows Why PageRank is Broken.Thanks. That patent filing took some work in figuring out how to try to present it.Andy, if anything, I think that this points out the value of making a strong site that influences people to stay and look around, focusing upon other things like usability, too. And, Google is just as likely as Yahoo to be working upon incorporating user data into what they do.aemberygood, thank you. I do like the idea that seeing how people browse and travel through websites can influence the perceived quality of a site. Of course, theres probably some replacing of one set of assumptions with another going on. What is somewhat interesting, and something that Usama Fayyad stated in some presentations last year, is that they are getting involvement from people in other disciplines, like economics.Barry, Absolutely. Colin, thank you for your kind words.